Libel in the Washington Post : Experiment in Information Retrieval III

Califlander at The Daily Kos quotes Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell

"Schmidt quickly found that Abramoff was getting 10 to 20 times as much from Indian tribes as they had paid other lobbyists. And he had made substantial campaign contributions to both major parties."

This assertion is false, Jack Abramoff gave money only to Republicans. Ambramoff gave to Republicans on 111 separate occasions. He gave to Democrats on 0 (zero) occasions. Furthermore it is very easy to determine that Howell's claim is false. It could only have been written by someone who knew it was false or recklessly disregarded the truth, that is, Howell's article constitutes libel.

I have a very slow dial up connection. I decided to see how long it would take to prove that Howell's claim is false. I blush to admit that it took me 5 minutes. First I vaguely recalled opensecrets and had to google to get the url. Then I decided not to use the headlined Abramoff story but just to look up Abramoff. Laziness defeated sillyness but it did take me a minute or two.

Some clicking got me here in 5 minutes over a connection so slow that smoke signals work faster.

Howell has, of course, conflated giving by Abramoff and giving by the victims of Abramoff's fraud. In less than five minutes, she could have found a misleading formulation as in "he and his clients or his clients" or a probably false claim which is hard to refute as in "He directed his clients to give both to Democrats and Republicans". There is no evidence for the last claim, but it is not trivially easy to demonstrate that it is false and at least one Republican operative claims it is true.

Howell is being Kossed, but just to do my bit, I suggest you e-mail ombudsman@washpost.com.